Tag: Crime Suspense Channel

Being one of the most prolific categories during The Golden Age of Radio, the airwaves were stuffed full with detective, police and suspense stories – shows about licensed (and unlicensed) “private eyes”, insurance investigators, police detectives, amateur sleuths from little known characters such as Philo Vance to giant detective legends such as Sherlock Holmes.

The Crime & Suspense Channel from the ROK Classic Radio OTR Network brings you 24/7 exciting capers, adventures and frights spanning nearly 80 years of radio history. So crank up your radio, find your magnifying glass, don your sleuth’s hat because it’s time to enter the radio underworld of crime, dastardly deeds and spine tingling suspense.

Here are a few classics not to miss on the Crime & Suspense Channel!

Host of Murder at Midnight Raymond Morgan

Murder at Midnight was an old-time radio show featuring macabre tales of suspense, often with a supernatural twist. It was produced in New York and was syndicated beginning in 1946. The show’s writers included Robert Newman, Joseph Ruscoll, Max Ehrlich and William Norwood, and it was directed by Anton M. Leder. The host was Raymond Morgan, who delivered the memorable lines of introduction over Charles Paul’s effective organ theme: “Midnight, the witching hour when the night is darkest, our fears the strongest, and our strength at its lowest ebb. Midnight, when the graves gape open and death strikes.”

A total of 50 episodes were produced. Ten shows were syndicated and rerun on Mutual in 1950.

The Dragnet radio show was a police action series that ran for 382 episodes over 7 1/2 years from

Jack Webb in an advert for the shows sponsor Fatima

June 3, 1949 to February 26, 1957 on the NBC radio network! It was the first police series that detailed every single step involved in police work. The street cops would often discover a crime, then the detectives would investigate and gather evidence. The questioning of witnesses and suspects was typically included. The show even went so far as to show the mundane tasks involved in police work like filling out paperwork.

For the first time, the audience got a feel for what a real cops job was like, not the glorified hollywood version. And yet, the stories were intense and definitely held the interest of the audience. The show’s creator, director and main star, Jack Webb, insisted on realism and accuracy in portraying the cops and detectives in the series. Episodes were based on real cases from the Los Angeles Police Department’s files. Dragnet also broke some (at the time) taboos by occasionally depicting sexual crimes and episodes where children were murdered.

Broadway Is My Beat, a radio crime drama, ran on CBS beginning with the July 7, 1949 episode, the series was broadcast from Hollywood with producer Elliott Lewis directing a new cast in scripts by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin. The opening theme of “I’ll Take Manhattan” introduced Detective Danny Clover, a hardened New York City cop who worked homicide “from Times Square to Columbus Circle — the gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world.”